AT thoughts

Submitted by shall on Fri, 2017-08-11 15:29

I wanted to hike the Appalachian trail when I was in highschool. One thousand two hundred miles. At 63 I find that I have no interest in the group scene that is talked about. It seems that many of the people doing the AP are recent college grads doing the trail before their first job. I would have liked to have done this myself, but I had to pay off my college so I started work a Bechtel Power

Now as plan I find that there are many more people hiking the trail than there used to be. Katahdin the northern end in Baxter State Park has started a permitting system which does not bother me except that they don't let you register on line, but only in person so you could do the hike and not be allowed to finish because they have run out of permits. If they would Allow you register on line so you could tell that you would be able to know that you could finish your hike. I am sure that the problem is that they can't tell who is going to finish until they get to the park. Last year only 29% of the North bound people finished the hike. So I am wondering if I should do the Hike.

One of my best memories is the hike with Pat, Mike, and Steve S.. We hiked in the Olympic national park I remember it as a loop around the Mount Olympus but there are no trails that match my memories in the maps at the web site. https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/maps.htm. So I suspect that my memory is faulty.

The four of us spent two weeks in the park. We didn't have a tent so we hiked from one shelter to the next. We stopped at a shelter at the top of a hight pass. and in late June got a snow storm. We got six inches of snow and could not see the trail that zig zagged down the other side. None of us had any cold weather cloths so in the end we did the best we could and went down the fall line until the snow had turned to rain and we could find the trail again. I remember being all scratched up and cold. We didn't have any cooking gear so we didn't cook and lived off deviled ham and crackers.

I feel bad that I have lost touch of these friends.

Published on Jul 27, 2017

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